Toronto sailor Diane Reid is back on dry land after part of her mast broke at sea, but she won’t be able to finish her race across the Atlantic.

Reid was taking part in the Mini Transat, attempting to sail a 21-foot boat from Spain to the Caribbean island of Guadeloupe single-handed. But on Wednesday, the bracket on her spreader broke and, under the rules of the race, she couldn’t get any assistance if she wanted to stay in the competition.

She managed to make it to shore in Lanzarote, one of the Canary Islands, before dawn Sunday, but ran out of time permitted for repairs and had to withdraw from the race.

“Even if I had the time to do the repairs, I would be three days behind the closest support boat and a day behind the closest competitor who left this port this morning,” Reid wrote on her blog Sunday. “There is a weather bomb of a low that will drop in and when it hits, I would be far, far out of range of conventional safety and rescue measures if something again went wrong.”

Reid realized she had a problem when she noticed a rivet head on the floor of her cockpit, said her husband, Paul Reid. She looked up and saw that her spreader had broken.

“That’s when she realized that she had to keep the main (sail) down, because she couldn’t put the main up and afford more stress on the rig,” he said.

Instead, she cranked the checkstays to keep the mast stable and used the smaller headsail alone to make it the rest of the way.

“I was extremely lucky that there wasn’t any bad weather and that the wind blew from the northwest to literally blow me into port,” Reid wrote.

She’s “bummed” she didn’t finish the race, her husband said, but the outcome had nothing to do with her abilities.

“She didn’t fail; it was her boat that failed,” he said. “When something decides to break, it breaks . . . she still managed to keep the rig up and sail 300 miles (480 kilometres) to shore without assistance and without anything else happening.”

Reid’s immediate challenge is to get her Mini 650 sailboat, One Girl’s Ocean, back home — a cost she didn’t expect to incur because she planned to finish on this side of the Atlantic. She estimates it will cost about $10,000 to ship the boat instead.

In the meantime, Paul Reid said, they are keeping things in perspective: “She’s safe and she gets to sail again.”

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